It was a midnight show on a Friday night — Woodstock maybe or Reefer Madness— after thirty-nine years it’s hard to recall.We’d sold around three hundred tickets, enough to create islands of life in the mostly-empty auditorium. Three hundred guests, in a room built to hold 2672. The following morning, as luck would have it, we’d agreed to rent our glorious St. George Theatre — every seat — to an evangelical revival church service. A thousand dollars! We could pay Warner and UA their cut of the previous two feature packages and somehow book another second- or third-run double feature. The traveling minister had called out of nowhere. Easy money! No projectionist to pay, no box office or concession staff, and at least a few of us “managers” could sleep late. But at 1:30, as the midnight show was winding down, our father-and-son cleaning service, tired of spilled Coke syrup and popcorn, and knowing they’d have to clean the whole place, including the balcony, resigned. It was early in our theater enterprise, only a month since the theater’s “Grand Opening.” We had plenty of entrepreneurial energy and a brand-new Electrolux canister vacuum, I’d bought the previous year. (Nicknamed “R2D2” for its resemblance to the character in Star Wars, our vacuum was a work horse that is still in business all these years later!) We also had a broom and an endless supply of trash bags. After the last usher left, three of us — all members of “management” — climbed the steps to the balcony, lugging the vacuum behind us. We would ace this and maybe catch a nap before the sun rose.Should’ve been a cinch in the balcony--that part of the theater was off-limits to the audience with its endless popcorn and spilled Coke. But somehow, despite our strategically placed Balc ny Closed sign on the lowest step to the Loge and a rope across the stairs at the other end of the lobby, there was more life upstairs than we thought: an empty bong, candy wrappers, a sweater, even a pair of panties! Why was I surprised? “Off-limits” means “come in” to at least a third of every population. As for finding surprising things, I just went to a play about a small-town movie theater, The Flick whose dialogue mostly happens while staff is sweeping up after hours. Chocolate Tapioca pudding — looking suspiciously like something else — and one shoe — are among the strange items found in that fictional theater. What people leave behind in the dark should never be underestimated.As I worked my way down the aisles with R2D2 that night (a colleague vaulting the seats just ahead of me, clearing away the bigger trash), I was ignorant of time. In a movie palace there is no daylight —that’s why pictures of half-demolished palaces, with their pierced domes, seem so shocking. Emerging sun-blind like the nocturnal cave creatures we’d become, we were stunned to learn it was seven thirty! The church people would be in the lobby in thirty minutes, to claim their temporary sanctuary. We’d taken better than six hours to clean the place. The area near the Orchestra pit, including the pit itself, had been particularly vile--banana peels and condoms. It smelled suspiciously like a subway platform — I will not elaborate. One of us broom-swept the stage--to which, in only a few hours, hundreds of “saved” souls would find themselves drawn, having “cast off” their crutches. The Reverend — whose name is lost to memory — arrived on time with a crew, including one man whose job it would be to audiotape the sermons and testimonies, and make instant high-speed copies for sale in the lobby, an impressive operation. Dean and I strode out into the light of day, looking forward to breakfast alone together at the diner down the street. It was — I forgot to mention — the morning of Dean’s 30th birthday. I seem to recall that he had an omelette.

It’s raining. I’m sitting in my car across the street from what was once our movie palace — half a lifetime ago, when I was twenty eight. Did I dream that I had a hand in running the the St. George Theater? That we painted the pillars outside red and aqua for the movie Jaws? That I sold popcorn and operated the dangerous live-circuit fuse-box that once powered the marquee? I’ve written more than forty blog posts about the SGT, and a three-hundred page memoir evoking our year in that dark cavern of dreams. The memoir, Starts Wednesday is in what I hope is its final draft. If I’m dreaming that I spent a year of my life walking the swirled tattered carpet in there, well I guess it’s a dream I’ll never wake up from.

Before settling into a parking place, I circled the block several times, ostensibly looking for a legal spot, so I could dash into Rispoli Pastry Shoppe next door to the theater, and grab a cappuccino. I found my spot finally, plunked some quarters into the muni-meter. Now I’m sitting in the car spooning the froth off the top of my coffee, trying to avoid going home, and gazing absently at the marquee — they ought to do something about that banner, the one that’s coming off, but never mind.

After paying for my cappuccino, I didn’t come straight back to the car. The doors to the theater were open, and — who could resist? — I went in. On the pretext of asking when Whoopi Goldberg tickets go on sale, I pulled back the friendly old red center door with its heavy gold deco-style handle--and strode right into the past. I was hoping there’d be nobody behind the box office window, and I got my wish, there wasn’t. I cruised around the pink marble foyer with its white and gold leaf plaster ceiling and small stained-glass chandelier, the one with those odd fake candles all clustered close, that look a little like fingers. Then I tip-toed into the lobby and reminded myself that the Pong machine stood right there. I used to play that game with whoever was standing by in the lobby, when I wanted to avoid thinking about how I was going to pay the electric bill. Of course, there was my office under the stairs. Mine was tiny. Current management has expanded it outward, into the lobby, to accommodate three or more desks. The big back office Dean used, with a sign stenciled on the door in gold, DISTRICT OFFICE is gone now: it’s been fashioned into a men’s restroom. The old men’s lounge (with a smoking room!) was in the basement, locked off these days. So it goes when you return to a house you once lived in and notice all the changes.

I feel covert, like a spy, when I enter the theater these days, even with a ticket in my hand. One door to the auditorium is open, and I eaves-drop briefly on the new lighting grid they’re building on stage. The stage: I miss the big old curved screen with its soda stains.

Will the St. George ever show movies again? Perhaps not — but, hey, it’s still around! So many old palaces — built for Vaudeville as much as for what was then a high-tech notion, moving pictures — are live working houses as they re-emerge. Given the St. George Theatre’s exquisite acoustics, why fight it baby?

The place was just forty-seven years old when I sat behind the filigreed box office cage with its broken electric TICKETS sign. On December 4, 2019 it’ll be ninety years old, though Blossom Seeley who opened that night would be, if she were alive, arguably 128 years of age. I’m in my late sixties and I probably look it, but the St. George, if anything, seems younger than I remember — hardly imperiled these days by neglect or a wrecker’s ball.

Check out the photographer Matt Lambros’ work documenting old theaters, many already in ruins. Next weekend, I’m driving — with our webmaster Robin Locke Monda — to Holyoke, Massachusetts as part of a photography workshop hosted by Matt, to visit the long-neglected and definitely imperiled Victory Theatre. Stay tuned — I intend to write about the Holyoke experience.

I digress.

Did you ever break up with a lover and meet him suddenly on the street? That’s how it is for me now when I open the doors to what I still consider my theater and walk in. I used to come and go through those lovely old red and gold doors daily. Now I need an excuse — a cappuccino at Rispoli or to ask about some tickets — to steel my nerves and feel a little bit less like a ghost.

"Thanks for calling the St. George Theatre, at 35 Hyatt Street in beautiful downtown St. George, just a block and a half from the boats in lower lower Manhattan."

People called our answering machine, often with no intention of coming to a movie, just to listen. St. George is and always will be in Staten Island (six miles south of Manhattan), but humor is a balm when you’re going broke running a movie palace.--and who knew? Maybe someone, anyone, would venture out on the ferry, discover us and want to book a few live acts, or at least buy a ticket. It was unusual enough to have an answering machine in 1976. Jim Rockford, the fictional TV detective had one. The fancy new Fox Plaza Twin, a rival theater, had one too, possibly the only other answering machine in all of Staten Island. Long before voicemail, our outgoing recorded message resided in a fifteen-pound box with a narrow slot that took an eight-track tape. The lease on this technological marvel cost nine hundred dollars--a small fortune--and it was entirely necessary. We had to get the word out any way we could. “What’s showing?” It was possible for a patron to walk under a lighted marquee into a lobby filled with posters and ask that question. It was also possible for a patron to call our cutting-edge message system just for fun. Our often-bored staff spent hours huddled over the mic in the grey box, performing vignettes, which happened also to include movie titles and showtimes. “Playing all this week,” one voice would announce, “is the director’s cut of The Exorcist.”Another voice, affecting a baritone, would interrupt, “Yup, come see me, the Devil: noon, two-thirty, five, seven-thirty...”After show and times were established, a conversation about where the Devil slept in the theater at night might ensue. One Friday afternoon, on a slow shift at the box office, one staffer counted over 280 incoming calls, and we expected a great night. We sold only 119 tickets. Our only regular vehicle for advertising, the local paper, frequently got movie times wrong, if not the feature itself. The previous tenant at the St. George had gone out of business owing the paper more than a thousand dollars, so nobody there loved us. “The ad says you’re showing The Exorcist, but the Time Clock, says it’s The Omen, “ a caller complained one Saturday. The New York Times was no help at all--they needed the listing two weeks in advance. We were happy if we knew two days ahead what the film canisters would contain when they arrived Wednesday morning.Putting flyers under windshield wipers at the Staten Island Mall for a live concert — Sly Stone — is how I spent one day of my twenty-eighth year. A lot of them blew away. I’m trying to imagine how the me of now would tell that young woman — me then — about a world where everything happens in the palm of your hand and the nine-hundred-dollar answering machine is history, because land-lines are too. Need movie times? Get an app!

As we drove down Flatbush Avenue last Saturday, I was sure I’d found the newly-restored Loew’s Kings, but Flatbush is not my native digs. A marquee loomed up on the left, just the ghost of a movie theater, these days a church, painted entirely white. We cruised a few more blocks counting street numbers, then in the distance I could clearly see it, an elegant carved vertical facade with a fantasy marquee, flat at the corners, curved in the middle, its wave shape like a gently-lifted curtain.

A friend mused the other day that saving old palaces might be quixotic, perhaps not cost-efficient. Back in 1976 when we tried to turn the St. George around, this was certainly the case. The St. George closed in 1977, as did Loew’s Kings, a fatally significant year for movie palaces. In Cincinnati, my beloved Albee (see previous blog post) was torn down. In Washington Heights in the same year, one of the Loew’s Kings’ sister theaters, the United Palace, passed safely into the hands of the ReverendFrederick Eikerenkoetter (aka Reverand Ike), who restored it and preserved it as a church. It still is a church — as well, these days, as a working theater.

But I digress.

I’m not a particular fan of Gladys Knight, our tickets were comps. We were going to the Kings to prove Marcus Loew’s observation, that “People buy tickets to theaters, not movies.”

And the Kings did not disappoint. From its massive seventy-foot American walnut foyer up the grand staircase to the mezzanine, it seemed — as Rapp and Rapp apparently intended — a little like Versailles, with something of the Paris Opera House thrown in. Every inch of its pink marble gleamed. The theater was the show.

All the seats are new. Only someone who has tried to refurbish a movie palace can fully appreciate what 3,250 completely new plush theater seats must have cost (at seventy-five dollars apiece in 1976, God knows how much now). As we sat in two of those seats, watching the grand house fill, my husband and former theater partner observed, “I can think of worse ways to spend $95 million dollars!” Spoken like a true impressario. On the subject of seats — or chairs — a magnificent suite of French furniture was rescued from the Kings’ lobby by Dorothy Solomon Panzica, the Kings’ manager from 1961 to 1975, before the theater closed. She kept it at her home in Corning, New York until recently, when, hearing of the theater’s revival, she returned it. Mrs. P is 101 years old.

The post-millennium Loew’s Kings does appear to be paying its own way, to answer my friend who wondered if restored palaces could be economically viable. Ten minutes before showtime about 90% of the seats were filled. The lights dimmed, the curtain (yes, and it is heavy red velvet!) rose. A follow-spot from the booth over our right shoulders cast a football-field-length beam on the sequined seventy-one-year-old Gladys Knight, standing center stage, and the show began.

Who saved the Kings? A lot of people and government entities. That in 1979, the city repossessed it for taxes and then sort-of forgot about it, didn’t hurt. After the millennium, when structural damage threatened, a consortium consisting roughly of the NYCEDC, Goldman Sachs, and several borough, federal and state entities partnered with the Houston-based ACE Theatrical Group. Which is not to discount the efforts of individuals such as the indomitable Matt Lambros, a photographer and old Loew’s Kings partisan, whose book about the Kings, including pre-restoration photographs, is “coming soon,” in theater parlance. Anyone who knows this man’s work will appreciate the role he played.

What was saved? An elegant space, yes. But wait, there’s more! As David Anderson of ACE notes, “This is the community’s theater...” — and the neighborhood’s, too. Before the concert, an enthusiastic parking lot attendant pointed us to his favorite bar, “...some real good food in there!”

We took his tip, and, after a meal of kick-ass jerk chicken and platanos, we cheerfully ran the gauntlet of hopeful entrepreneurs standing under the marquee (souvenir programs, postcards from a local palm-reader and other offerings). Several folks we passed on the street asked, “Goin’ to the Kings? —good show — you won’t be disappointed!” The buzz on the street was hot. I can’t verify that the attendants inside taking tickets or pouring drinks were from the neighborhood, but I suspect most of them were. They were all so friendly, so excited. According to the NYCEDC a hundred full-time jobs —and a lot of part-time ones, were created, while bringing the Kings back to its original opulence. The young woman who showed us to our seats, the guy who directed us up the grand staircase, were proud of their palace, and it showed.

I thought about our staff in 1976, kids from our own neighborhood, St. George, proud and awed by the theater’s faded glory. What would Paulie and Brenda and Diane and Dafan and Tony and LeRoy and Gene and Jim have thought of all this glamor? They would have reveled in it.

AfterthoughtThe Brooklyn Paramount — a little farther down Flatbush Avenue from the Kings — which has operated for many years as an Athletic Center, will re-open as a functioning theater. The Paramount was a major scene in the early days of both Rock (Alan Freed) and Jazz (think Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Ellington).

I can’t help thinking that the Kings restoration may have spurred this revival....

As for the Brooklyn Fox, a downtown Brooklyn gem, in its latter days home to Murray the K, it was, sadly, torn down in 1971. You can’t win ‘em all.

Everyone has a great love, some have two. So it has been for me, with movie palaces.

In 1976, while we were trying to save the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, my original great theater love back home in Cincinnati, the RKO Albee, was already flashlight-dark and silent, its Wurlitzer organ removed, cobwebs forming on the cobwebs that shrouded its enormous crystal chandelier. All through my childhood, it had been the palace of palaces. Built by Lamb, it was lavish, with thirty-five hundred seats, a 40 x 70 Czech Maffersdorf carpet, lamps from John Jacob Astor’s Fifth Avenue Mansion in New York, and...and. Before it was built, in 1926, The Cincinnati Times Star heralded its arrival, like the birth of some important prince:

“...it is enough to say that it will be an Albee theater. That is, it will have all the magnificent and artistic beauty of the Albee theaters in Brooklyn and Cleveland, which are distinctive as the finest theatrical structures in the world. The realty was taken over on a basis of nearly $2,000,000, so the total investment will be $3,500,000, and Cincinnati will have the finest moving picture house in the world.

Though the theater will be used, for some time as least, for the showing of Greater Moving Pictures, it will have a full stage with complete equipment, all necessary dressing rooms and the same marvelous backstage arrangement, which exists at present only in the two Albee theaters already built.”

Cincinnati’s Albee opened on Christmas Eve in 1927, its first movie the silent Get Your Man! starring Clara Bow. For fifty years, the Albee — and not necessarily whatever movie was showing there — was what Cincinnatians put on silk stockings and Beau Brummel ties to see. I was lucky to be amongst the last generation to watch two layers of curtain — one brocade, the other a sheer scrim — part over every event, to know tuxedoed ushers, and to visit a ladies room with full-length mahogany mirrors.

Phil Lind, who used to work as an usher, recalls, “It was a fun job.... Sometimes we would stand around and talk, and other times we would explore the theater. We went from the roof to the basement....” (which apparently included underground passageways to Wiggins — the bar next door — and the Gibson Hotel, where Vaudeville actors used to stay).

But every beginning has its end. Here is a description of what some local citizens had to say, while still others fought to save the palace from the wrecker’s ball, in 1977:

“...the Save the Albee Committee was formed, but it had little effect. City manager [of the time] E. Robert Turner, flatly stated that the Albee could not be preserved ‘...at the expense of tasteful and decent development’ around Fountain Square. The city planning director echoed a similar sentiment, noting that under no circumstance was the Albee worth saving. ‘We have movie theaters downtown, and entertainment facilities nearby for music, opera, drama and dance. What do we need another one for?’

In 1977, the entire block...was demolished for Fountain Square South [a project] that consisted of a Westin [hotel] and a Firstar Bank....”

To quote Joni MItchell, “They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Treasures from the Albee remain. Its organ, wisely purchased by the Ohio chapter of The American Theater Organ Society, sheltered for many years at a small local hall (The Emery Theater), now itself facing possible demolition. It spent about a decade in storage, emerging in 2009 to a safe, and hopefully permanent home in the ballroom of Cincinnati’s Music Hall.

As Joseph Hollman, Ohio Valley chapter president of the ATOS, pointed out, “Too many pipe organs were sold as parts and the organ broken up for sale, eliminating that organ’s originality. Others were torn down with the theaters they were housed in...”

Anyone who read my blog post on the whereabouts of what is left of the St. George Theatre’s fine old Wurlitzer will not be able to miss the irony.

In my life, it is a remarkable coincidence that we lost our lease on the St. George Theatre in 1977, the year the Albee was torn down. The St. George would remain shuttered for decades, narrowly dodging the Albee’s fate.

Beyond the Albee’s rescued Wurlitzer, other parts — including the theater’s ticket booth — survive in Music Hall’s ballroom — a pilgrimage I need to make the next time I’m in town. A pair of magnificent bronze doors graces the Ohio Theater in Columbus, a few hours’ drive north. But the theater’s grand entryway, a classical arch of some distinction, didn’t fare as well. In 1977 it was fitted out to adorn the front of the Sabin Convention Center. In 2006 a renovation transformed that unremarkable building into the Duke Energy Center. Writing in 2011, The Cincinnati Enquirer (Jim Rohrer) remarked that the theater’s arch seemed "plastered on a modern building of no apparent style...." He wondered if this was “... any way to treat a grand old lady?"

Indeed. Few passersby notice the arch, or know what wonders once lay beyond it. So it goes with the old palaces, the ones that remain, through accident or the prudence of local activists — or — as with the St. George — great financial risk of a single individual.

Author

Victoria Hallerman is a poet and writer, the author of the upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, based on her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976. As she prepares her book manuscript for publication, she shares early aspects of theater management, including the pleasures and pain of entrepreneurship. This blog is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were. And a salute to those passionate activists who continue to save and revive the old houses, including the St. George Theatre itself. This blog is updated every Wednesday, the day film always arrived to start the movie theater week.